40th Anniversary Festival

Letters to Milena

LETTERS TO MILENA

There is a room inside you - old photographs, notes, lumber, light comes in and out. There is a room inside you, every now and then it would collapse and fall into pieces, the bricks spinning around, crushing into each other and coming back to their places. They would do so each time you overstep yourself, change direction instead of staying on your path, letting your fragile, ivy overgrowth body touch something unknown. You overstep yourself, the bricks spinning around, and when someone nearby would collapse too, the bricks may mix and change their places, so that when you get back to yourself, on your desk you would find something that was never there.

Aleksandra Nowakowska

Letters of 38-years-old Franz Kafka to 24-years-old Milena Jesenska, czech journalist and translator living in Vienna are the record of deep mutual understanding, impossible love, as well as a mirror in which the author looks at himself. Fire that burned him in his relation with Milena, brought the most fulgent fragments of his prose.